Fairspell Meadow the sound of silence

Continuation thread for @Allure II and @Swift!

When Bazi stopped, she was several pounds lighter and in the middle of some unknown meadow in the Kintla Flatlands. Her teeth had long since pierced the tough skins of her children's tough ruffs, and she was suddenly aware of the sharp metallic taste of their blood. The sound of bears snapping at their heels was long gone, and even though she could still hear their guttural roars in the imaginarium of her mind, Bazi dropped her children in the grass - and retched bile  at their feet.

Above them, there was nothing - only the black sky.

Blood matted at her fur – from Bazi’s own teeth marks that were inevitable after such a travel and gripping her children so tightly.. and likely from her brother. Allure had kept her eyes on anywhere but him as they moved.. it felt like hours.

Bazi had evaded their attackers, and dropping the puppies to the ground in a tumbled pile, Allure could hear her mother retching. It was when she realized her nose was only inches from Swift’s dangling eyeball that she began to throw up as well – her tiny body heaving with every ounce of energy left before trying to pull away from her littermate.

Sobbing hysterically between her now dry heaves, the bi-toned cub tried to keep her wailing quiet. “I want dad,” she allowed, her form shaking as she crumpled closer to the ground.

He woke a short time before his mother stopped, but made no sound and did not move. He was as limp as he had been when he passed out. When his mother dropped him and his sister into the grass, he lay there shivering and trembling. His chin and mouth were soaked in drool that collected in globs and hung in long, dangling strings.  

He was dimly aware of his family retching, and of his sister speaking, which sounded to him as though she were far away down a cave. He could scarcely see them. Even the eye that remained in its socket had been damaged, and perceived little more than moving shapes and colors, and even those were stained red as peered through a curtain of his own blood.

"Mom..." he croaked, his plea strangled by a sob.

:( My babies!

They were alive. For the first few moments after setting the pups down, that was all that mattered - Allure retched and whimpered, scared but looking otherwise intact when her mother choked back a second wave of vomit and looked her over with bleary eyes. "I want dad," the little girl whined. Me too, Bazi thought, but there was no time for any of them to surrender to self-pity. Scimitar was far away, and not everyone had made it out of the Grove unscathed. Swift was hurt.

"Find running water," Bazi instructed Allure in a soft voice, ushering her away from Swift. "Don't argue, come straight back when you find it. Not a sound." A cursory glance at Swift was enough to know that his sister needed to be somewhere else. His face was a mess of blood and torn flesh, but the worst injury of all was the punctured eyeball hanging out of its socket by a bundle of thin, pink fibers. Even in the poor light, it was grotesque.

"Mom..." he gurgled, shattering his mother's heart. She gave Allure a final shove and rushed to his side, curling herself around his pale, trembling body. It was hard to look at him. "You'll be fine, sweetheart. You're injured, but you'll be fine." Bazi's voice was a high, false whine - and a lie. She rolled Swift onto his back, pinning his lower half under her elbow and supporting either side of his head with her paws. You didn't need to be a healer to know that there was no hope for the eye. Bazi swallowed a second wave of sick, and steeled herself. Quick, and without warning. "I'm so, so sorry, honey," Bazi whispered - then she seized her son's eyeball and bit it off.

Feel free to skip Allure a round or two since she's water hunting. :)

Bazi wasted no time. Swift’s soft voice broke out, and the bi-toned girl could not bring herself to look at him, or the eyeball that dangled uselessly from his eyes. She lifted tearful eyes up to her mother instead, who was now transfixed upon her son.

She was ushered away – the slender white snout pushing her in a direction, and her paws began to carry her away without direction. She only slowed as she heard Bazi’s high pitched voice, and looking back to catch a glimpse as her mother shifted her weight upon the boy, the black and white girl knew she would not want to watch further.

With her heart hammering in her chest, vomit drying on her lips, Allure raced off to see if she could find water – attempting to block out any noises that might follow her as she did so.

He took comfort in his mother's presence, at her words despite its unnatural pitch. His alertness was severely throttled, and even as she rolled him onto his back and pinned him, he did not suspect what was about to happen next. She whispered a desperate apology, and it was then that he tensed. "Mom?" He barely had a chance to utter even that single word, before her muzzle was a blur in what remained of his vision. "MOM!!!" he shrieked as she severed the hanging eye. Instantly, there was a searing pain slicing through his skull; his legs flailed madly as he writhed in her grasp. The pain was accompanied by a dizzying assault of flashes, stars, and all manner of frantic, confusing signals before, mercifully, all input from that eye ceased.

His thrashing was stopped by the exhaustion that now claimed him. He lay in his mother's arms trembling, whimpering. His mind, dazed from the assault of pain and terror upon it, had yet to fully process what had happened to him. His paranormal knowledge of healing plants and means to treat injuries did not spring forth, as it had before in moments similar. He had but one thought.

"I'm going to die," he sobbed.

It would live on in memory as one of the most hideous things she had ever been compelled to do. Bazi nearly chipped her teeth in an effort to sever the slimy bundle of strings as quickly as possible, and the sound of her son screaming shattered her heart. Metallic-tasting saliva flooded her mouth, and the impulse to vomit tightened her empty throat and gut - the eyeball rolled off her tongue and into the grass, followed by a string of spittle and bile.

Bazi hastily wiped her mouth and turned back to Swift, who had been reduced to a quivering mess. His socket was a mess of black nothing, but the blood was not flowing as freely as before - a good sign. He might almost look presentable after a serious bath and a few weeks to heal; in her delirious denial, Bazi might even have described one of the narrower claw-marks as 'neat work'.

"You'll be just fine," she soothed, and promptly got down to the business of cleaning him up, starting on the bib of dried blood that covered his face and working up towards the source. Her voice and actions were brusque, separated from panic by a paper-thin veil of false confidence. Of course he would be fine. "But you'll need to help me, OK? You need to tell me what to give you. Alright? You're the healer now."

For some reason, perhaps a child's instinct to trust their mother, he believed her. He calmed, but drew his forepaws tight to his chest and tucked his tail as she started to lick his face. He still quivered under her caresses, for each lick seared him, so raw and painful were his wounds. She spoke again, asking for his help, asking him to draw on what he knew about injuries and the plants to mend them with.

He shook his head and whispered a defeated, "I can't," but medicinal knowledge was akin to instinct for him, and with his mother's prompt, it soon surged to fore. "Horsetail," he gurgled, but then he cleared his throat, and spoke with a calm confidence that was unlike the frightened toddler of a moment ago. "And cobweb for the cuts. Black sage for pain."

Black sage? Bazi cursed herself for a lifelong tendency to dismiss the plant fangirling of healers and apothecaries. There was a disdain for it buried in her bones. "We'll find them - all of those," she hurried to promise, but her ears had picked up an ominous sound. The muffled thud-thud of something heavy on the approach. It was still far off, but moving at a pace that suggested Morran and her crew had picked up the scent of fleeing wolves again. It was time to move.

Bazi swatted Swift's eyeball out of the way - it was no use wasting time trying to bury it. As gently as the need for speed would allow, she seized Swift by the scruff of his neck and hoisted him off the ground. Despite her best efforts, his toes touched the ground - @Allure II would have to help. "AURR!" Bazi yelled through mouthful's of her son's fur, calling in the direction her daughter had gone. Whatever water she had found was useless to them now. The exhausted alpha began to move, moving crab-like in an westerly direction with one eye searching the darkness for her daughter.

His mind was soon aswim in thoughts of what needed to be done to treat his wounds: clean them, pack them with cobweb, and apply a paste of chewed herbs to stave off infection, and an assortment of details that accompanied each macro step. It deafened out most other thoughts, dulled even some of the pain now that his concentration had been pulled from focusing on it, but even the darkest of his thoughts could not hide that foreboding thud-thud that spurred his mother to move.

"No..." he whined piteously, his body trembling with a resurgence of fear, and images of the slashing claws and gnashing teeth pouring to the forefront of his mind. His mother hoisted him up, hollered for his sister; they were on the run again.

Allure was panicked.

She had thought running from the fire that swept through the Northwoods had stirred such a thumping in her chest, but she was wrong. The loss of an eye for her brother—the blood that pooled from her family’s wounds.. Nothing could compare to the sickening fear that made her almost immobile.

And trying to find water would prove to be futile. Her senses shut down – she would inhale, and all she could smell was the iron of blood. If she tried to listen for the water, all she could hear was the sickening slap of Swift’s eyeball as it hit against them when they fled.

And so she cried. Her tiny form curled in upon itself, and her sobs came – the very real thought that Swift could die – that they would never be home again. Something dark had fallen over them, and she could no longer envision a time when they would be curled safely amongst each other once more in peace.

Her sobs, though hysterical, would not drown out Bazi’s screech. The bi-toned puppy was on her paws in moments, and while she might have considered it not possible for how tired she was, adrenaline would surge her forward, and she was within distance to Bazi’s fleeing form, the tears drying as the wind hit her cheeks.

Maybe they would never stop running.